Inspiration fills the heart, …  Ego swells the head

‘Bipolar Disorder’ is endemic among Western culture adherents, and the ‘conservative’ – ‘liberal’ division is its manifestation on the scale of the social collective, while schizophrenia aka ‘the divided self’ is its manifest form within the most sensitive ‘miner’s canary’ individuals that are among those who have fallen into the Western culture adherence trap.

To imply that Western culture is the carrier of a certain type of psychological aberration is not a ‘write-off’ of Western culture in general.  It is to imply that Western culture encourages, as a common feature in its languages and grammar, belief in the ‘reality’ of ‘sorcery’ (the locally instantiated sourcing of actions and developments) which obscures, occludes (‘wallpapers over’) the real physical reality of the transforming relational continuum, … the Tao “that cannot be told” since we ourselves are developments within it and all is in a continual flux, as Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta all agree.  Use of the term ‘Western culture’ in this philosophical investigation is thus intended to distinguish this very basic ‘difference’ in what we generally refer to as ‘the West’ when we distinguish ‘West’ from ‘East’ as in ‘never the twain shall meet’.

The very basic psychological difference that is at the bottom of this ‘splitting’ termed ‘West’ versus ‘East’ in Kipling’s poem is the same difference as divides ‘inspiration’ and ‘exaltation’.  These are the ‘two sides of a common coinage’ that Western culture tends to divide and set in opposition against each other.  ‘Bipolar disorder’ is the result.  Western culture’s endemic ‘bipolar disorder’ becomes manifest in the commons, in the division of people into the opposing ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ political camps.  This psychological division; e.g. as to whether the ‘boil’ sources the ‘flow’ or the ‘flow sources the boil’ in a rapidly moving fluid dynamic is illusory and has been mocked in by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels by the disagreement that divides a community on the question of whether a boiled egg should be opened from the pointy end or from the roundy end.

In Western culture ‘politics’, the bipolar division between ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’ is over whether the individual ‘sources’ collective action (“One bad apple spoils the whole barrel) as is the conservatives’ belief, or whether the collective ‘sources’ the individual’s action (“it takes a whole community to raise a child”) as is the liberals’ belief.

This binary dividing into opposites that pivots from the abstract concept of ‘sorcery’ does not is not manifest in indigenous aboriginal culture since the understanding is that all things are aspects of one transforming relational continuum; ‘mitakuye oyasin’ (we are all related).  The separateness of individuals is thus in aboriginal or ‘Eastern’ cultures, only apparent and not physically real, consistent with modern physics and the philosophical interpretations of David Bohm, Erwin Schroedinger and Nietzsche, which reaffirm that ‘everything is in flux’ of Heraclitus and the Tao of Lao Tzu.

This essay aims to put the spotlight on WESTERN CULTURE’S INBUILT BIPOLAR DISORDER which ‘shows up’ not only in sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’ who are, by birth and circumstance, ‘caught up in’ Western culture, but which also divides the Western culture social collective into ‘conservatives’ and ‘liberals’.  Both of these ‘bipolar disorders’ arise from a language and grammar cultivated belief in ‘sorcery’.   

This Western culture splitting of the social collective and within the individual is psychological and derives from the Western culture belief in ‘sorcery’.  ‘Sorcery’ is abstraction that, as Nietzsche points out, arises from a ‘double error of language and grammar’.  The double-error based concept of sorcery is innately psychologically ambiguous and leads to division, not only to division of people into opposing groups (conservatives and liberals) but to division within the psyche of individual Western culture adherents, particularly so with sensitive ‘miner’s canaries’, so-called because of their openness to the dynamics of the world in which they are situationally included, … and sensitive openness that they have not (and do not want to) learn how to ‘turn off’.   This does not work well for them when they are immersed in a social collective wherein the common belief is the ‘double error’ belief that one is an ‘independent being’ with its own powers of sourcing actions and developments.

The sensitive ‘miner’s canary’ that opens herself up to the world, thrives in a community of sensitive miner’s canaries (who, in Western society often find themselves gathering together in the same venue; i.e. the psychiatric ward).  For the sensitive and open ‘miner’s canary’, …being ‘open’ in an unfiltered manner to relational engaging with others, can be hazardous when one is immersed in a cultural collective that promotes the ‘double error’ based belief in the ‘independent self’ with ‘its own powers of sourcing actions and developments’.  Because Western society teaches the belief in the ‘independence’ of the individual, not only is there no acknowledgement that the sensitive miner’s canary’s issues are not ‘coming from within’ but are coming from her inclusion in a social collective wherein the common belief is the ‘double error belief’ (i.e. that the individual is an independent being with innate powers of sourcing actions and developments, encouraging an ‘everyone for themselves’ mode of operation that is innately dysfunctional in a reality wherein ‘everything is related’ (matakuye oyasin).

In this case, the sensitive miner’s canary that opens up to those around them based on an inborn intuition of ‘mitakuye oyasin’ becomes the ‘identified patient’ while ensconced in such an aberrant culture (i.e. in the radically UNNATURAL belief system that is, in Western culture, understood as ‘NORMAL’.   Western culture is not a safe environment for those sensitive miner’s canaries whose intuition that ‘we are all related’ has persisted in its natural precedence over the psychologically aberrant ‘double error’ belief in oneself as an ‘independent being with one’s own powers of sourcing actions and developments’.

The ‘Identified Patient’:

The term emerged from the work of the Bateson Project on family homeostasis, as a way of identifying a largely unconscious pattern of behavior whereby an excess of painful feelings in a family lead to one member being identified as the cause of all the difficulties – a scapegoating of the IP. 

The identified patient – also called the “symptom-bearer” or “presenting problem” – may display unexplainable emotional or physical symptoms, and is often the first person to seek help, perhaps at the request of the family. However, while family members will typically express concern over the IP’s problems, they may instinctively react to any improvement on the identified patient’s part by attempting to reinstate the status quo

The sensitive and open ‘miner’s canaries’ (a ‘minority’ within the Western culture social collective that is, meanwhile, ‘mainstream’ within indigenous aboriginal community) that finds itself in a Western social collective of ‘double error’ believers is going to experience the same issues as the indigenous aboriginal with her understanding that ‘all things are related’ that is brought into the Western culture ‘double error’ based social dynamic with its belief in ‘independent beings with powers of sourcing actions and developments’.  When an individual that intuitively understands that all are included in one transforming relational continuum finds herself within a social collective that believe, on the contrary, in the double error, their psyche is pulled in two opposing directions and THEY are diagnosed with bipolar splitting or schizophrenia, simply because the Western culture social collective assumes the double error as psychological ‘normality’.

Because there is no longer any question as to how ‘natural’ Western culture ‘normality’ is, the conclusion that Western culture is itself the ‘crazy-maker’ is passed over and the focus descends on the individual manifesting symptoms of a ‘divided self’ (bipolar disorder, schizophrenia).  In other words, there is no acknowledgement that it could be that Western culture psychological conditioning is the crazy-maker.  Why else would individuals coming into Western culture from culture’s which understand that ‘we are all related’ succumb to what Western psychology diagnoses as ‘schizophrenia’  when there is no history of it in their family and community?  This continues to be an unanswered question in Western psychiatry; e.g.

Research by Cochrane and Sashidharan shows that the incidence of schizophrenia in non-native born blacks in the U.K. is 3-5 times higher than native born blacks. As these researchers point out, this effect cannot be due to genetic difference or other sources within the individual. Their point is that a science that studies ‘mental illness’ is not going to explain what is going on in this case, a study of mental health  (which expands the realm of investigation to include the social dynamic the individual is situationally included in) would instead be required.  However, ‘science and reason’ employ an ‘operative reality’ that is based on ‘the double error’; i.e. it is an ‘operative reality’ that is in terms of intellectual noun-verb-predicate constructs [‘what things do’] and it is only ‘intuition’ that acknowledges relational influence [non-local, non-visible, non-material influence] as the source of physical phenomena.  While this is available to our ‘Intuition’, intuition is not incorporated in the rational investigations of traditional Newtonian science. As a result, ‘conventional science and reason’ stand in our way of understanding the physical reality of our natural experience, which includes ‘spiritual stress/distress’;

“From the outset it will be clear that most of the research in this field has followed the conventional epidemiological or medical paradigm by focusing on mental ill health as the dependent variable. It is, therefore, not surprising that there is a lack of empirically grounded research on mental well-being or the psychological resilience and survival of minority groups in this country” — R. Cochrane (University of Birmingham) and S. P. Sashidharan (North Birmingham Mental Health Trust) in ‘Mental Health and Ethnic Minorities’

ALL OF THIS PSYCHOLOGICAL ‘SPLITTING’  IN WESTERN CULTURE, WHETHER WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL (THE DIVIDED SELF) OR WHETHER IN THE SOCIAL COLLECTIVE (THE DIVISION INTO CONSERVATIVE AND LIBERAL) DERIVES FROM BELIEF IN THE DOUBLE ERROR BASED CONCEPT OF ‘SORCERY’.  THE SPLITTING ARISES FROM THE INNATE AMBIGUITY AS TO WHETHER THE ‘BOIL’ SOURCES THE ‘FLOW’  OR WHETHER THE ‘FLOW’ SOURCES THE ‘BOIL’.   THE ANSWER IS ‘NEITHER’ SINCE THE DIVISION ARISES ONLY IN THE WAKE OF FIRST ASSUMING ‘SORCERY’.   THERE IS NO ‘SORCERY’ IN A TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM.

Bipolar disorder and schizophrenia are phenomena that arise from the Western culture conditioned psychological belief in ‘sorcery’, the belief in which gives rise to ‘ego’ and to the binary opposites of ‘good’ (the producer-product sourcing of good actions and developments) and ‘bad’ (the producer-product sourcing of bad actions and developments).  In reality, there is no such thing as ‘sourcing’; it is the psychological ‘double error’ that comes with our compromising of the nature of the Tao in order to be able to render it discursively.  Note that the ‘surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ is an alternative approach to render the innately ineffable Tao ‘effable’.  This is the option that has been identified by modern physics researchers Geoffrey Chew and John Wheeler and also in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein that does not have the psychological bipolar disorder exposure that associates with the ‘double error’ aka ‘sorcery’ based approach.

Inspiration is relational intuition that fills the heart while ego is rational intellection that swells the head

Inspiration comes with inclusion in the Tao that cannot be told while ego is bolstered by the intellectual voice in the head that is employing ‘double error’ based abstraction of name-instantiated things-in-themselves with notional powers of sourcing actions and developments.  Belief in the language and grammar based double error aka the belief in sorcery, is a crazy-maker that has become a Western culture foundational belief that feeds the ego and eclipses (wallpapers over) and occludes the natural primacy of inspiration over rational explanation.

‘Duning’ is how resonance, which is purely relational wave energy, ‘appears’.  To use language and grammar to objectify ‘appearance’ is a reductive tool that, as Emerson observes, is ‘running away with the workman, the human with the divine.  In other words, the double error recasts us, in our language and grammar interpreting psyche, to local, independently-existing things-in-ourselves, notionally endowed with powers of sourcing actions and developments.  THERE GOES THE TRANSFORMING RELATIONAL CONTINUUM OF OUR ACTUAL SENSORY EXPERIENCE.  ‘Duning’ is the experience grounded reality affirmed by our sentient experience of inclusion in purely relational resonances.  ‘Dunes’ that ‘grow higher and longer and shift to the south’ are voyeur freeze-framing pictures of ‘what is going on out there’ that we impose on the transforming relational continuum we share inclusion in.

“The more eyes, different eyes, we know how to bring to bear on one and the same matter, that much more complete will our ‘concept’ of this matter, our ‘objectivity’ be.” — Nietzsche, ‘The Genealogy of Morality’

 While there may appear to be so many things going on in the above discussion that it seems impossible to bring them together into a coherent connective confluence, this is not so.  The basic ‘problem’ is the belief in ‘sorcery’ which comes from the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.  The belief in sorcery gives rise to ‘ego’ and to the ‘producer-product concept that we Western culture adherents have given a foundational role to in psychological INVENTED REALITY.  No more ‘transforming relational continuum (the Tao) once we have psychologically wallpapered over it with our sorcery-based INVENTED REALITY.

If the reader’s Western culture conditioned mind is struggling with this discussion, this should not come as a surprise since the language I am using cannot explicitly and directly communicate understanding based on our experiencing of inclusion in the Tao.  Our experiencing of inclusion in the Tao can only be alluded to indirectly since ‘everything is in flux’.  This same message is shared by Wittgenstein in the final two propositions in Tractatus Logico Philosophicus;

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

“7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

 

So, how to ‘summarize’ the understanding shared in the above network of relational inferences designed to inform on a level beyond the explicit proposition based level?

There is no way to ‘explicitly summarize’ understanding that is made accessible to the reader/listener if she is willing to bring the network of relational inferences into connective confluence in her mind so as to extract the relational coherence as an understanding that is and will remain beyond the explicit understanding-articulating capability of language and grammar.

The key philosophical ‘take-away’ is as captured in Wittgenstein’s final point in Tractatus;

“7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The implication here, as reaffirmed in modern physics, is that the reality of our experience of inclusion in the Tao; i.e. in the transforming relational continuum is beyond the explicit articulating capability of language and grammar. Poetic inference and ‘the surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’ are ways of using language to infer experiences in the Tao that are innately beyond explicit capture and conveyance.

If the reader needs an ‘intellectual hook’ that will ‘bring him back inside this understanding of the ineffable nature of our experience in the Tao, it is that there is no such thing as ‘sorcery’, the double error based mainstay of Western culture INVENTED REALITY.

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FOOTNOTE:  HOW TO AVOID FALLING PREY TO WESTERN CULTURE’S INBUILT BIPOLAR DISORDER

 

As discussed in the essay above, the Western culture ‘double error’ of language and grammar establishes the abstract intellectual concept of the ‘independent being’ with notional powers of ‘sourcing actions and developments.  Such abstraction allows us to use language and grammar to capture (in a crude manner) an articulation of the Tao, even though ‘the Tao that can be told is not the true Tao’ since the ‘Tao’ is the all-including transforming relational continuum in which we are included.  It is therefore NOT ‘out there’ in our voyeur viewing plane.  The psychological splitting that gives rise to the concept of the separate existence of ‘self’ and ‘other’ or ‘inhabitant’ and ‘habitat’ can’t be done without incurring a residual ambiguity in such intellectualizing that crops up in terms of whether the inhabitant is sourcing change in the habitat or whether the habitat is sourcing change in the inhabitant.

“Does the man shape the times’? … or, … ‘Do the times shape the man?”  Which is the source of which?

Such thinking assumes the ‘reality’ of the concept of ‘sourcing’ influence or ‘sorcery’ even though there is no place for ‘sorcery’ in the Tao, the transforming relational continuum.  ‘Sorcery’ is an abstract concept that arises from the ‘double error’ of language and grammar, as pointed out by Nietzsche and as discussed in the above portion of this essay.

It is worth noting that the belief in sorcery leads to innate ambiguity not only within the individual but also within the individual’s concept of the social collective.  This ‘bipolar disorder’, whether at the level of the individual or the collective, begins with the ‘double error’.  The social collective version of bipolar disorder shows up in the conservative – liberal collective disorder (a sorcery-based abstraction) while the individual version of bipolar disorder arises from ambiguity as to whether one’s behaviour is sourced from an internal voice that gives advice or whether from external voices that give advice.  Of course, the answer to this is to stop believing that one’s actions need to be sourced by voices giving instructions.  Intuition arising form our sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum bypasses the need for ‘voices of intelletualized instruction’ whether internally or externally sourced.  This ambiguous, schizophrenic ‘bipolar disorder’ dissolves with our acknowledging that there is no such thing as ‘sorcery’ (sorcery is an abstract concept that arises from the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.).   Western culture adherents continue to believe in double error based abstraction and thus have an exposure to ‘bipolar disorder’ not only at the level of the human individual but also at the level of the human (Western culture adhering) social collective.

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The Following Example of Western culture promotion of belief in ‘mass murder’ is an example of how the ‘double error’ of language and grammar corrupts our understanding and has us fall prey to ‘bipolar disorder’ on the scale of the Western culture collective.   *** Note that ‘mass murder’ could equally be understood in terms of something going wrong within the Western culture social relational dynamic, as contrasted with Western culture adherents ‘splitting themselves’ into two polar opposite groups or categories; i.e. the criminal/insane group and the normal/sane group.  This is the first psychological step in leading to initiatives aimed at quelling emergent eruptions of relational dissonance as seen in terms of the double error based concept of ‘sorcery’.

 

In relational dissonance seen as battle action, many people may be wounded and die and it may be that many deaths can be related to the actions of a single person who fired at (unarmed or armed) people in a seemingly random fashion.

 

If this sort of thing goes on all the time then we can characterize the social collective as being prone to emergent bouts of relational dissonance.  That is, we could characterize such killings as a property of the ongoing social relational dynamic rather than as a discrete emergent ‘event’ with a ‘start’ and an ‘end’ as where we portray it as a ‘mass murder’ and isolate a particular person who we identify as the ‘source’ of a bout of murderous actions and developments.

 

The notion of ‘sorcery’ comes from a ‘double error’ of language and grammar.

 

This falls under the general heading of social-relational dissonance until we invoke the double error wherein we (first error) use naming to impute abstract thing-in-itself-existence to a form, and (second error), conflate the first error by imputing the power of sourcing actions and developments to the name-instantiated thing-in-itself.

 

If there is ongoing social relational dissonance, we may not want to invoke the one-sided concept of ‘sorcery’.  For example, instead of speaking in terms of ‘dunes’ that source growth and shifting; “the dunes are growing higher and longer and are shifting to the south”, we may speak in terms of ‘duning’ which invokes in the mind, the primary physical reality of spatial-relational resonance (atmospheric turbulence can arise as pressure wave resonance that inductively pulls windblown sand into wave-like forms that grow and shift (aka ‘duning’).  To say that ‘dunes’ form and grow and shift is exemplary of the ‘double error’ of language and grammar.  In reality, there are wave energized resonances which pulls sand into wave-like forms we call ‘dunes’.  These ‘dunes’ are not ‘things-in-themselves’ with their own powers of growing and shifting, although we use language and grammar to conjure up an intellectual double error to that effect.

 

Whether we are talking about humanings or nationings or corporationings, the reality is that these are relational forms in the transforming relational continuum.  There are no such things as ‘things-in-themselves’ with ‘their own powers of sourcing actions and developments.   That is all ‘double error’ based imagination/abstraction.   Neither ‘dunes’ nor ‘humans’ nor ‘nations’ nor ‘corporations’ have God-like powers of sorcery.  Such powers are granted to them by grammatical double error;

 

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we continue to believe in grammar” — Nietzsche

 

Grammar is what ‘supplies the power of sorcery’ within the ‘double error’ of grammar.  We can give this power of sorcery to a human, to a nation, to a corporation, or to any name-instantiated thing-in-itself

 

Of course this is pure abstraction, but we Western culture adherents use this grammar based ‘double error’ abstraction to construct our Western culture INVENTED REALITY wherein, for example we impute powers of sourcing actions and development to all manner of things; ….  ‘dunes grow taller and longer and shift to the southeast’ , or ‘hurricane Katrina grows larger and stronger and ravages New Orleans’, … and ‘John Wilkes Booth shoots and kills Abraham Lincoln’.    All of these are examples of grammar based mental pictures (abstractions); i.e. they are all double error based abstractions aka ‘sorcery’ based abstractions.  There is no such thing as sorcery in a transforming relational continuum (the Tao) and there are no such things as ‘dunes’ that ‘shift across the desert floor’

 

As Bohm points out, the transforming relational continuum is the physically real reality and it is Western language and grammar and its double error based INVENTED REALITY that is screwing up our sense of ‘reality’.  Bohm pointed to the need for a language that captured the fluid nature of reality which avoided the ‘double error’ and recognized that such a language already existed;

 

A few months before his death, Bohm met with a number of Algonkian speakers and was struck by the perfect bridge between their language and worldview and his own exploratory philosophy. What to Bohm had been major breakthroughs in human thought — quantum theory, relativity, his implicate order and rheomode – were part of the everyday life and speech of the Blackfoot, Mic Maq, Cree and Ojibwaj.” – F. David Peat, ‘Blackfoot Physics’

 

The implication is that the Western culture language and grammar based ‘double error’ (sorcery) which currently plays a foundational role in Western culture INVENTED REALITY, is unrealistic abstraction that sets up a false ‘surrogate’ sorcery-based pseudo-reality that is obscuring our access to the ‘real reality’ of our actual sensory experience of inclusion in the transforming relational continuum; i.e.  in the Tao that cannot be told, and can only be inferred, for example, as in ‘the Surprise version of the game of Twenty Questions’.

 

In the indigenous aboriginal culture, ‘murder’ associates with relational dissonance and the subduction of an included human form.  The understanding is that reality is a relational dynamic and thus the needed response in the case of deadly dissonance is to recultivate relational harmony.  Only in the Western culture context of the double error of language and grammar does the abstract concept of ‘sorcery’ arise as in the suggestion that there is a ‘murderer’ that sources the removal of a notional ‘human thing-in-itself’.

 

In the indigenous aboriginal culture where there is no ‘double error’ concept of an independent individual with its own powers of sorcery, …the response to murder is to restore balance and harmony in the social collective.  Relational social collective can be like freeway traffic wherein a disturbance such as by a stray dog running across the road and may induce a long series of braking and swerving so that out of such relational dissonance, one vehicle may collide with another in which case the identification of a ‘guilty offender’ (sorcerer) and an ‘innocent victim’ is a gross oversimplification    Similarly, in ‘Les Miserables’, Jean Valjean is sentenced to prison for moving a loaf of bread from a region of plenty to the hands of a starving waif (a rebalancing action).   Such cases reflect the ‘double error’ (sorcery) basis of Western culture intellection, occluding the innately relational nature of the Tao dynamic.

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